After the election, populists of the right and left could hobble a centrist president
He has a domestic agenda, but no easy way to bring it about
American fried chicken can now be served from the Philippines
Deadly heat is increasingly the norm, not an exception to it
An energy-rich future is within reach
The future of combat
Technology will make war faster and more opaque. It could
The character of warfare is about to be profoundly changed by artificial intelligence
Growth alone will not fix Britain’s public finances
A snap election in France reveals the flimsiness of his legacy
Wine collectors are at last taking champagne seriously
The Guardian Weekly (June 19, 2024) – The new issue features Emmanuel Macron’s ballot box gamble – Could the far right gain political power in France? Plus: the record detectives fighting back against bootleggers
Spotlight | Kharkiv under siege
Luke Harding and Artem Mazhulin report from Ukraine’s second city where living conditions are increasingly precarious
Environment | The fight to save Norway’s arctic foxes
Captive breeding has helped reduce threats from predators and the climate crisis – but can the species survive long-term?
Feature | The vinyl frontier
John Harris meets the record detectives going after music’s retro bootleggers
Opinion | Starmer’s quiet man appeal
The UK Labour leader has been accused of being a “political robot”. But, argues Jonathan Freedland, that’s exactly why he’s so far ahead in the opinion polls
Culture | Alive and Kicken
On its 50th anniversary, culture writer Eliza Apperly pays tribute to the Berlin gallery that helped pioneer photography as an art discipline
The Guardian Weekly (June 13, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Blood Lines’ – The human cost of Europe’s cocaine habit’; The Far Rights surges across EU; A doughnut theory of the universe; The muscular rise of steroids…
In a week when much of the attention in Europe was on far-right political gains in the parliamentary elections, the Guardian Weekly’s cover shines a light on another of the continent’s disturbing undercurrents.
A Guardian investigation has found that hundreds of unaccompanied child migrants across Europe are being forced to work for increasingly powerful drug cartels to meet the continent’s soaring appetite for cocaine.
In cities including Paris and Brussels, gangs are exploiting the “unlimited” supply of vulnerable African children at their disposal, using brutal means to control their victims, including torture and rape if they fail to sell enough drugs, as they seek to expand Europe’s $13bn cocaine market.
Mark Townsend reveals the plight of the illegal trade’s child foot soldiers, while Annie Kelly explains the growing problem of cocaine use in Europe. And from Ecuador, Tom Phillips reports on how death and destruction follow the drug on its complex journey across the Atlantic.
If America wants to maintain its lead, it should focus less on keeping China down
Elsewhere, political dysfunction and fiscal frailties are taking a toll
A Trump victory would reward them. But not enough to justify the risks
The peninsula is becoming a death trap for the Kremlin’s forces
There is more to AI than ChatGPT
At a crucial moment they encapsulate the dilemma of how to handle populism
A backlash against abortion bans is energising the middle ground in America
They are saving like never before. But even that may not bring interest rates down
Economies must adapt to baby busts instead
As birth rates plunge, many politicians want to pour money into policies that might lead women to have more babies. Donald Trump has vowed to dish out bonuses if he returns to the White House. In France, where the state already spends 3.5-4% of gdp on family policies each year, Emmanuel Macron wants to “demographically rearm” his country. South Korea is contemplating handouts worth a staggering $70,000 for each baby. Yet all these attempts are likely to fail, because they are built on a misapprehension.
Governments’ concern is understandable. Fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere and the rich world faces a severe shortage of babies. At prevailing birth rates, the average woman in a high-income country today will have just 1.6 children over her lifetime. Every rich country except Israel has a fertility rate beneath the replacement level of 2.1, at which a population is stable without immigration. The decline over the past decade has been faster than demographers expected.
The death of the president changes the power dynamic
A new generation of AI chips is on the way
The rainbow nation needs an alternative to decline under the ANC
Rishi Sunak’s election call makes no sense, but is good news
Its collapse could be sudden and irreversible
At first glance, the world economy looks reassuringly resilient. America has boomed even as its trade war with China has escalated. Germany has withstood the loss of Russian gas supplies without suffering an economic disaster. War in the Middle East has brought no oil shock. Missile-firing Houthi rebels have barely touched the global flow of goods. As a share of global gdp, trade has bounced back from the pandemic and is forecast to grow healthily this year.
The assignment of judges to cases should be random, not political
Under Lawrence Wong, the city-state has a new chance to change
Despite Xi Jinping’s protestations, China does have an overcapacity problem
How to pacify the world’s most violent region
The Guardian Weekly (May 8, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Nowhere to call home’ – Inside Europe’s housing crisis…
Elections for the European parliament are less than a month away and far-right parties are predicted to make significant gains in many of the bloc’s 27 member states. The dire shortage of housing, leading to rising rents and property prices, is becoming a unifying focus for voters’ discontent with their current political leaders.
The issue has sparked protests from Amsterdam to Prague and Milan, as the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, Jon Henley, reports. The data is undeniably worrying as young Europeans spend up to 10 times an average salary on rent and mortgage payments, and big cities from the Baltic states to the Iberian peninsula have registered average property price rises of close to 50%. As a result more EU residents live with their parents for longer and put off life-decisions later into adulthood.
While housing does not fall within MEPs’ remit, it is a visible locus for the sense of social unease that has beset the whole bloc and has become a pivot for the far right to turn on racialised minorities. But as European community affairs correspondent Ashifa Kassam discovers, it is those communities that are doubly penalised through discrimination from landlords who, research has shown, turn away potential renters with “foreign” surnames. The political and social ramifications of the housing crisis in Europe is mirrored elsewhere across the globe and is a subject we will return to in the Guardian Weekly in this year of elections.
Boomers Daily 